This is a man's world..... but it wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl

[antisocialmunky]

Would the ratio really have to be all that high though? Remember that most of Herodotus' sources were simply average people, and to the average Hellene, wouldn't any participation of women in the military be considered strange enough to report to him?

I'm not trying to claim that his account is wrong, we have little else (except scant archaeological evidence) to prove it either way. However, Herodotus has been known to exaggerate on occasion, and if his source is another Hellene, who would almost certainly be astounded by any female military participation whatsoever, it would make sense that the situation might be exaggerated. To someone whose culture finds the idea of women fighting in the military absurd, a culture where this is an uncommon practice looks like a culture where it is a common practice, if you get what I'm saying. People tend to notice and exaggerate the exceptions, especially when it is an exception that is incomprehensible to them.

Of course it may be true. All I'm saying is that I don't think the fact that it was noticeable enough to report is reason enough to claim that it was a common practice. People tend to latch onto and focus on the exceptions in cultures different from theirs in order to differentiate that culture from their own, even if the practices in question are not that common.

However if you compare those accounts to the accounts of the women of other peoples fighting. They are more or less descriptions of one off events like the Cimbri women fighting to the death, women leading rebellions, women rallying the troops, the women of SPARTA!!!! etc. They considered it an oddity.

However when Heroditus interviewed the locals that routinely had contact with the Scythians, they refered to it like a common thing. And its not just the military. Heroditus wrote of a certain Scythian tribe where the women were counted equally as the men were. Even today in parts of the steppe the woman is regarded as the boss of the house while hte man is the boss of the outside. If the men were out campaigning the women would have to keep down the fort, feed themselves by hunting, herd the animals, be able to ride to keep up with the herds etc.

On the archaelogical front, you then have the rich burials of females with weapons that make up a noticable amount of the total burials attributed to Scythians derived tribes(25% so says wikipedia).

So that's why I'm saying that it was a regular and noticable occurance. The evidence seems to indicate against a society that relegated women to a purely secondary position. Instead it does not indicate against a society that gave women a fair degree of social mobility. In this context the idea of a society that produces of a noticeable amount of female warriors is not particularly unlikely. Afterall, military make up reflects the society its based on.

You also have to take into account that the Scythians did a fair amount of trading so they had regular commercial contact with the city dwellers around. You also have to take into account that Heroditus didn't just talk to Pentheus, dirt farmer of Armenia - he would have visited cities and talked to people who knew something about the geography.

Of course things are exaggerated and Heroditus wrote down whatever he heard, but people aren't going to describe the presence of one woman in battle the only time they see them as 'Scythian women were important in their society.' People always get enamored by the idea of 'female warrior' that they ignore the context of a 'female run society.'

[WinsingtonIII]

However if you compare those accounts to the accounts of the women of other peoples fighting. They are more or less descriptions of one off events like the Cimbri women fighting to the death, women leading rebellions, women rallying the troops, the women of SPARTA!!!! etc. They considered it an oddity.

However when Heroditus interviewed the locals that routinely had contact with the Scythians, they refered to it like a common thing. And its not just the military. Heroditus wrote of a certain Scythian tribe where the women were counted equally as the men were. Even today in parts of the steppe the woman is regarded as the boss of the house while hte man is the boss of the outside. If the men were out campaigning the women would have to keep down the fort, feed themselves by hunting, herd the animals, be able to ride to keep up with the herds etc.

On the archaelogical front, you then have the rich burials of females with weapons that make up a noticable amount of the total burials attributed to Scythians derived tribes(25% so says wikipedia).

So that's why I'm saying that it was a regular and noticable occurance. The evidence seems to indicate against a society that relegated women to a purely secondary position. Instead it does not indicate against a society that gave women a fair degree of social mobility. In this context the idea of a society that produces of a noticeable amount of female warriors is not particularly unlikely. Afterall, military make up reflects the society its based on.

You also have to take into account that the Scythians did a fair amount of trading so they had regular commercial contact with the city dwellers around. You also have to take into account that Heroditus didn't just talk to Pentheus, dirt farmer of Armenia - he would have visited cities and talked to people who knew something about the geography.

Of course things are exaggerated and Heroditus wrote down whatever he heard, but people aren't going to describe the presence of one woman in battle the only time they see them as 'Scythian women were important in their society.' People always get enamored by the idea of 'female warrior' that they ignore the context of a 'female run society.'

Good points, you know more about this than I do, I was just trying to conjure up what I had learned about Herodotus years ago and thought I remembered him being somewhat prone to exaggeration. I wasn't really implying that it was an exception in Scythian society (I agree the evidence points against that), I was just saying it may have been more uncommon than we have come to believe, due to the process of exaggeration throughout history and in Herodotus' lifetime as well. There's a whole spectrum of "regular and noticeable" occurrences. All I'm saying is that even though evidence implies it was regular activity, it may not have been as overwhelmingly common as we think. That wasn't the clearest way of putting that but I hope you get what I mean.

Additionally, the fact that the burials of females were rich implies that these can only tell us something about the life of female nobility. Perhaps the nobility was fairly egalitarian towards women, but the amount of gender inequality grew as one descended the social ladder. In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised at all if this were true. Scythian women almost certainly had it many times better in terms of equality than the women of many other ancient societies, that's clear. However, I think that applying the term "female-run society" is pretty idealistic. At the top we seem to see hard evidence (archaeology) that females were regarded as somewhat equal to men, but the patriarchal household may still have dominated at the lower levels.

Who knows? Maybe I'm just skeptical because I don't want to believe that ancient societies may have been more egalitarian than modern western society. That's a pretty sad commentary on "progress."

[antisocialmunky]

'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way.

Yeah, I said something to the same effect above that EB should only include some women in the Noble units. They would be the ones that could afford to goto war. The regular women would be watching things back home. I don't know though... the campaigns of Genghis Khan, he's said to have had the wives and other women of his troops ride into battle to padd his numbers and break the enemy morale. However Mongols and Western Steppe peoples are quite different and the Scythians never went on campaign quite THAT long.

[WinsingtonIII]

'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way.

Yeah, I said something to the same effect above that EB should only include some women in the Noble units. They would be the ones that could afford to goto war. The regular women would be watching things back home. I don't know though... the campaigns of Genghis Khan, he's said to have had the wives and other women of his troops ride into battle to padd his numbers and break the enemy morale. However Mongols and Western Steppe peoples are quite different and the Scythians never went on campaign quite THAT long.

I'd agree with both points, I was implying the same thing you said of the term progress myself when I put it in quotation marks. I'm just not sure if the evidence is convincing enough that the average woman would go to war. The women should be included in noble units.

[Cyclops]

'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way...

Yes indeed, or in multiple directions at once. The more things change, the more they stay the same...except for the bits that change.

The representation of Skythian women warriors is worth this debate. We do have some steppe people burying women with weapons which are certainly status markers, but quite possibly also occupation markers. We have more and less dodgy references to warrior women, especially among steppe peoples.

Were the Skythians a confederation of tribes with varying rank, paying tribute in cattle and service up the chain? It may be whole tribes ranked as warrior class, women and men included, so there might be a case for women among less-than-elite HA's. In a warrior culture weapons are the status marker, but military service (for the proportion of women fit for this service) might be a corollary or even a requirement of that.

(Cf women like St. Joan, Elizabeth 1 wearing armour, not because they entered the fray but because it was pretty much a required leadership token.)

Of the course the question of physical capacity is a fair one. I'd note that men unable to bear arms might well be excluded from high status groups (cf Talleyrand was excluded from inheriting his fathers title because he was lame, a sort of barbaric holdover from a similar Frankish tradition I guess). Fewer women would be able to carry the heavy armour we see Noble HA's wearing.

If bearing arms gave greater status, and some women were eligible for that status, then they might paricipate at the level of their physical capacity: a greater number with less armour, weilding a bow and rather less bow/lance armed semi-catas. In this rather hypothetical situation we might see more female heads in the lesser-status HA's.

Its all interesting speculation and I feel anti-social's position is a fair one: a few female heads in the better class HA's is probably to best bet.

[antisocialmunky]

@ Cyclops

That's quite true. That's why female warriors are most often associated with ranged weapons if you discount the things like the female gladiators of Rome.

I'm not going to get into the issue of armor. I think they would have been able to use it quite fine with the proper training.

@ ziegenpeter

Wut?

[The General]

While this is all very fascinating, I'm wondering how all this is directly related to the question whether female warriors will be depicted in nomadic units in EBII?

[Ludens]

While this is all very fascinating, I'm wondering how all this is directly related to the question whether female warriors will be depicted in nomadic units in EBII?

It isn't. I've created a new thread for this discussion: is progress real?